


I Could Be

by LilacNoctua



Category: Naruto
Genre: Awkwardness, Fluff, Getting Together, M/M, the Bruce Lee shirt is too powerful
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-18
Updated: 2020-08-18
Packaged: 2021-03-05 23:02:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25973335
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LilacNoctua/pseuds/LilacNoctua
Summary: It was no good. He could feel his face getting redder by the second. Soon it would be impossible to hide it. The only way he was going to get through this was to talk as little as possible and avoid looking at him directly.Kankuro seemed to be having no such difficulty. "Lee, what the hell are you wearing?""Oh, this?" Lee gestured at his new outfit. "It is pants and a shirt.""Yeah, yeah I see that," Kankuro agreed. "Bit different from your usual though, isn't it?”“Yes! Thank you for noticing!” Lee cried.“Kinda hard not to,” Kankuro muttered.Gaara isn't sure what he did to deserve this. . .
Relationships: Gaara/Rock Lee
Comments: 28
Kudos: 181





	I Could Be

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is a gift for @flightlessdevotee on tumblr, and is inspired by [this artwork](https://flightlessdevotee.tumblr.com/post/626662389013725184/looks-very-poor-but-i-just-wanted-to-try-show-my/). Thank you for the inspiration, I only hope I've done your idea justice!

"Wh-" the question didn't even make it all the way out of Gaara's mouth before he choked on his own saliva and had to duck his head to hide his distress beneath the broad brim of his hat. He tried again. "Lee, I. . . uh, I mean. . ." 

It was no good. He could feel his face getting redder by the second. Soon it would be impossible to hide it. The only way he was going to get through this was to talk as little as possible and avoid looking at him directly. 

Kankuro seemed to be having no such difficulty. "Lee, what the  _ hell  _ are you wearing?"

"Oh, this?" Lee gestured at his new outfit. "It is pants and a shirt."

"Yeah, yeah I see that," Kankuro agreed. "Bit different from your usual though, isn't it?”

“Yes! Thank you for noticing!” Lee cried.

“Kinda hard not to,” Kankuro muttered.

Lee continued as though he hadn’t heard him. “Gai-sensei said that the jumpsuit is ideal for training, but now I have graduated to a jounin level mission despite still being a chuunin! This is not training anymore, so Gai-sensei bought me these new clothes so that I would be prepared for anything!.”

“Can you even move in those pants?” Kankuro asked skeptically.

“Of course! They are very stretchy!” To demonstrate, Lee swung one leg up in the air, grabbed his own ankle and pulled it up so that the bottom of his foot pointed straight up to the ceiling and his shin rested alongside his ear.

Gaara had to remind himself to keep breathing. He surreptitiously reinforced the sand armour across his cheeks to hide their colour.

“Well it looks great, dude,” Kankuro told Lee cheerfully. He nudged Gaara. “Doesn’t it?”

Gaara’s eyes flickered back towards Lee against his will, taking in extremely tight (but evidently, improbably stretchy) pants with a Konoha headband threaded through the belt loops, and a form fitting, dark green shirt fastened up the front by laces which had been left loose, allowing the shirt to gape open across his chest. His eyes stuck there, on that exposed patch of skin, and refused to move away, no matter how hard he tried. 

“Hey, if you’re going to sit there with your mouth hanging open, you can at least say something,” Kankuro prodded when he had remained silent for too long. 

Gaara dragged his eyes further upwards and realized that Lee was staring at him expectantly, chewing his lip.

“Yeah,” Gaara managed to croak. “It looks great.”

Lee positively beamed at him. Gaara momentarily considered encasing himself in sand and refusing to come out. Instead, he forced his eyes down and feigned sudden interest in a spot on the surface of his desk.

“I appreciate your dedication, Lee,” he said. “But you really should not have gone to so much trouble for me. My rounds of the village are routine and my security personnel are usually quite bored.”

“By ‘security personnel’ he means me,” Kankuro put in. “And he’s right; it’s boring as shit. At least escorting Temari to Konoha will be scenic.”

“Right,” Gaara said, carefully rearranging the pens and brushes on his ink blotter. “Thank you for agreeing to this assignment on such short notice, Lee. Temari’s regular security is out on a mission that has run longer than expected, so Kankuro must accompany her on her trip. You were here in the village anyway, and I trust you, so -”

“Please do not worry!” Lee interrupted him. “I was happy to take this assignment! Spending time with you is always fun!”

Now Gaara was blushing without even looking at Lee. He was losing hope that he might survive this day without doing something horribly embarrassing. 

“Should we get going then?” Lee asked.

“I suppose we had better.”

Gaara stood up just in time to watch Lee turn and dash for the office door. He wrenched it open and held it for Gaara, bowing. Gaara turned to shoot Kankuro a look of dread on his way out. His brother had the audacity to cackle.

Gaara managed to survive his rounds of T&I and the Cypher Corp more or less unscathed and only slightly distracted. Lee followed behind him, sticking close but out of sight unless Gaara turned his head just so (which he found himself doing more than was strictly necessary). He managed to maintain his professionalism throughout his conversations with the department heads and elite jounin, and only once had to ask someone to repeat themselves. He looked over their records and reports and only occasionally had to read a sentence twice because Lee had leaned just a bit closer to him or turned to laugh at something another ninja had said. 

Lee had an especially lovely laugh. It made Gaara feel warm all over in a completely different way than that outrageous shirt did. 

By the time they arrived at the academy, Gaara was beginning to think that maybe he had just been overreacting. There was a class practicing taijutsu in the yard and the teacher waved at Lee and called to him as though she knew him. 

“I am sorry!” Lee called back to her. “I am Gaara’s security for today! I will help another time!”

“No, that’s alright,” Gaara said quickly. “You can do a demonstration while I speak with the headmaster and visit the classrooms. The academy is safe enough.”

“Thank you!” Lee ran past Gaara and was soon engulfed in a crowd of children.

Gaara breathed a sigh of relief and turned towards the building. It wasn’t that he didn’t enjoy Lee’s company. In fact, he preferred spending time with Lee over almost anyone else. It was just that these meetings were an important part of his job, which he took very seriously, and sometimes Lee’s presence was distracting. He usually tried not to dwell too much on what that might mean, but Lee’s new ‘jounin level mission’ outfit was making that impossible.

To his dismay, the headmaster came out of the school to meet him and gestured at a bench at the edge of the yard.

“Why don’t we have our meeting outside?” he suggested. “It’s not everyday we get Rock Lee dropping by as a guest instructor. I’d like to watch his demonstration.”

Gaara could not think up a sensible reason to refuse quickly enough so he was forced to nod and acquiesce graciously. 

Lee had lined up the class and was walking them through a new kata, movements as smooth and fluid as silk. Gaara couldn’t help but watch him from the corner of his eye as the headmaster spoke about a new initiative for students who showed remarkable promise in one specialized field.

“You need a stronger stance,” Lee told one of the students. “Watch! Legs wide, knees bent. Yes, keep your centre of gravity low! Back straight, shoulders relaxed - no, not up near your ears, roll them back - yes, chest up. Good. See, now I am strong. Just try to knock me over.”

Lee stood still as first the one student he had been correcting, and then her friends, tried and failed to push him over.

“It’s no use,” the student decided. “We’ll all have to attack at once.”

Lee laughed and motioned for them to try it. The students huddled at one end of the yard and whispered amongst themselves for a moment before charging at Lee. He stood perfectly still as several small bodies hit him square in the chest. Two teams of smaller students grabbed his ankles and tried to pull his legs out from under him. After a few more failed attempts, the students fell back to lay panting in the sand. 

“It’s impossible!” their ringleader cried. “He’s too strong!”

“You will be too, if you use the proper stance!” Lee assured her. “When I am in this stance, not even your Kazekage can knock me down.”

“That’s not true!” another student shouted. “Lord Gaara can beat anybody!”

All the other students shouted their assent, insisting that their Kazekage was the strongest ninja on earth. Gaara looked up from the report the headmaster had been showing him to find a crowd of children staring at him.

“It’s not true, is it, Lord Gaara?” One student demanded. “You can knock Lee-sensei down.”

“Of course I can,” Gaara agreed. Behind the students, Lee grinned at him. He tried to turn back to the report but a little girl came up and tugged at the edge of his jacket. 

“You’ll show us, right Lord Gaara?” she asked.

Gaara sighed and turned to the headmaster. “Excuse me. It seems I have to defend my reputation.”

As he crossed the yard towards where Lee stood waiting, he finally allowed himself to think about what it was that was bothering him so much about Lee today. There wasn’t even anything that unusual about the shirt. Lee’s regular uniform, though it covered a lot more, fit him like a second skin, left all his muscles on display as he moved through his attacks and defenses. Gaara had been fighting alongside him and sparring with him long enough to notice that. And the shirt wasn’t even that unusual for a shinobi. Temari’s wardrobe was full of dresses cut at gravity defying angles, and Naruto’s friend Sai only ever wore, at best, half a shirt. It had certainly never occurred to Gaara to stare at Sai’s midriff the way his eyes were now magnetically drawn towards Lee’s chest. 

The conclusion he came to, as he drew level with Lee in the yard, was that he was just going to have to pull himself together. He was no longer some callow, hormonal teenager; he was the Kazekage. The sight of another man’s chest should not be enough to make him lose his focus, even if it looked like it belonged to a statue of a god and was shimmering with sweat under the mid morning sun. If that man also happened to be wearing very tight pants, and Gaara would have been willing to move heaven and earth just to see him smile, well, he had overcome wilder impulses before.

He took another step forward, reached out . . . and froze. He had not considered until now that in order to knock Lee over, he would have to actually touch him. He could just use the sand to sweep his feet out from under him but that felt like cheating. 

“Go ahead,” Lee said, smiling reassuringly. 

Gaara took a deep breath, dug in his heel, and then charged at Lee. He threw his shoulder up against Lee’s sternum as hard as he could.

Gaara had tried doing this before. He had figured that this was why Lee was goading him; he had failed miserably the last time. The last time, even two dozen Narutos hadn’t been able to budge him. It had only been the sand that had finally pulled him down. So he was shocked when Lee toppled backwards with little resistance. He had expected to bounce off Lee like a rubber ball, but instead his shoulder had connected and kept going. Lee fell and Gaara landed hard on top of him.

“Oh no!” Lee cried. “Gaara, are you okay?”

“I didn’t think you would fall,” Gaara said quietly. Lee’s stomach rose and fell with rapid breaths beneath him, the warmth of his body seeped through Gaara’s clothes. 

“Of course I did,” Lee whispered. He nodded towards the children. “You are their hero. I was always going to fall for you. Oh! I mean, um. You know.”

Gaara realized then that Lee’s face was just as red as he knew his own was. And extremely close. So close, that he could actually see where the pupils of Lee’s eyes ended and the dark irises began. Close enough that Gaara could make out a tiny scar just beneath his lower lip. Close enough that if he leaned forwards just a tiny bit more. . . 

Gaara rolled away quickly and scrambled to his feet. Lee leapt up as well, laughing nervously and rubbing the back of his neck. He scuffed one foot in the sand and opened his mouth as though to say something, closed it again. Gaara heard the students whispering somewhere behind them, and briefly considered just teleporting home to shut himself in his room and hide there for the rest of the day.

A bell rang somewhere inside the school, and the teacher began rounding up her students. Gaara hurried back towards the headmaster, but he stood up and began gathering his papers. 

“We’ll finish up another time,” he assured Gaara. “I’m sure you have other obligations today.”

“Yes,” Gaara said, too flustered to protest. “Thank you for understanding.”

He made his way back to Lee and they exited the school yard together.

“Where to now?” Lee asked cheerfully, skipping along at his side.

“Lunch with the merchants’ association,” Gaara remembered, struggling to avoid looking at Lee. 

“Excellent!” Lee shouted. “I am starving!”

Gaara said nothing, just continued walking at a brisk pace, half hoping that Lee would lag behind slightly. He felt awful for wishing for such a thing. He saw Lee so rarely, and always treasured what little time they could spend together, but now his traitorous thoughts were making it impossible to enjoy this.

“Do you think they will have curry?” Lee wondered. Gaara glanced over at him as he reached his arms up towards the sky, then brought them down behind his head, arching his back. The laces at the front of the shirt strained against the stretch. 

Gaara stumbled to a halt as something in the back of his mind snapped. Lee turned towards him and before he could say anything, before Gaara could even think about what he was doing, he had seized the dangling ends of the laces and yanked the front of Lee’s shirt closed.

“Oh,” Lee said quietly. “I thought you liked it?”

His eyes had gone wide and his eyebrows had drawn down into a wounded expression that made Gaara want to hug him, to reassure him that he had done nothing wrong. Instead, he remained frozen with the ends of the laces still in his hands, and all that came out of his mouth was a strangled, “Shut up.”

Lee’s lower lip wobbled just slightly. Gaara wanted to bite it. 

“Gaara, what is wrong?” Lee asked, his hands coming to rest on Gaara’s shoulders, stooping slightly to look him in the eye despite Gaara’s attempts to look anywhere else. “Have I done something to offend you?”

“No!” Gaara said quickly. “You couldn’t. . . I just. . .”

“It is okay,” Lee reassured him. “You can tell me.”

“I’m not. . . it’s too. . .” Gaara stammered. “I mean. . . I shouldn’t. . .and the shirt . . .”

He was aware that he was making no sense, but Lee was still standing so close to him, looking so concerned, and Gaara could not string his thoughts into a full sentence no matter how hard he tried.

“The shirt?” Lee asked. “If that is the problem, I can always take it off.”

“No! No, please don’t,” Gaara wheezed, as all the blood drained from his face.

“Are you okay?” Lee asked, the concern in his face turning towards alarm. “You do not look well.”

“I’m not,” Gaara managed to choke out.

“Did you get hurt when you fell earlier?” Lee gasped. Suddenly his hands were underneath Gaara’s hat, feeling along his scalp. “Did you hit your head?”

“No, nothing like that.” Gaara pushed his hands away so that he would not give into the urge to lean into them. 

“Are you sick?” Lee asked.

“Yes, sure. Sick,” Gaara agreed, desperate for a way out of the corner he’d backed himself into.

“What is it?” Lee asked. “Heat stroke? A cold? Have you eaten enough today? Have you slept?”

“No. I don’t know.” Gaara’s eyes dropped back down to the front of Lee’s shirt where the lacing at the front was beginning to gap open again. 

Do not worry,” Lee assured him. “I will take you to the hospital at once, and they will fix you up in no time!”

“No, that’s alright,” Gaara said, backing away. “I can walk there myself. Your assignment is over, you can just go.”

“Do you really think I would do that?” Lee demanded. Before Gaara could protest, Lee had scooped him off his feet and began marching briskly in the direction of the hospital.

Having to spend the morning trying not to blush every time he looked at Lee had been bad enough, but now he was cradled in Lee’s arms, being carried through the streets of Suna like the heroine of some romance novel. There was no one around to see at the moment, but there would be as they got closer to the centre of town. Gaara reassured himself that the head of the medical corp probably knew some forbidden jutsu that could erase his memories of this entire, embarrassing morning.

He took a deep breath and suddenly he was surrounded by the scent of Lee’s skin, the soap he used to wash his clothes. It was familiar and comforting but also made him want to enjoy the way Lee’s arms felt around him, made him want to touch the skin that peeked through the gaps between the laces and was now pressed up against the sleeve of his jacket. He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to breathe as shallowly as possible.

“Gaara?” Lee asked, jostling him slightly. “Are you going to be alright? I can run if you need me to.”

“It’s just. . .” Gaara opened his eyes again and found Lee’s face scant inches away from his own. “The heat.”

“You must take that seriously,” Lee admonished. “Is it a sunburn? Are you dehydrated? Are you running a fever?”

He hesitated a moment, seeming at a loss for what to do since his hands were preoccupied with holding Gaara up. He leaned his head to the side and pressed his cheek against Gaara’s forehead to test its temperature, accidentally knocking his hat off in the process.

“Only a little warm,” Lee murmured. 

Gaara absolutely could not take it anymore. His hands seemed to move of their own accord, grabbing at Lee’s head and yanking his face down. He pressed his mouth up against Lee’s in a clumsy, lopsided imitation of a kiss, then let him go and jerked away as though he had been scalded.

Neither of them move. Lee had gone very red in the face and just stood gawking at Gaara, saying nothing. He made no move to put Gaara down. Instead his arms seemed to tighten around him subconsciously. Gaara remained frozen there, unable to speak or move or even think properly as the full force of what he had just done hit him, and panic screamed through his veins.

“Gaara?” Lee finally asked, his voice a hoarse whisper. He wobbled, took a step backwards, stumbled. His back collided with the stone wall of a building and he leaned against it heavily. “Gaara. . . what. . .”

“I’m sorry,” Gaara whispered. “I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have done that.”

Lee only shook his head.

“You can put me down.”

Lee shook his head more vigorously. “What was that?”

“I’m sorry,” Gaara said again. “I must confess that I have been thinking about you in a way that is not appropriate to think of a friend. I understand if you are angry.”

Lee’s knees buckled and his back slowly slid down the wall until he was sitting on the ground. He still did not let go of Gaara. 

“What do you mean?” he whispered, his eyes searching Gaara’s face. Gaara was afraid of what he might find there but resisted the urge to call up the sand armour. 

“They just aren’t the sort of thoughts you think about a friend,” he repeated.

“Then,” Lee said slowly. “Who should you think those thoughts about?”

“Perhaps,” Gaara hesitated. He knew the right word, but struggled to force it off the end of his tongue. “A lover.”

He felt Lee’s sharp exhale ruffle his hair. 

“I could be. . .” Lee began to say. “That is, I mean, only if you -”

“Want?” Gaara finished the sentence for him. “Yes.”

Lee’s smile unfurled like a bud bursting into bloom after a sudden rain. Gaara watched his lips stretch back over his teeth, the way the corners of his dark eyes crinkled and his flushed cheeks rounded, and he knew that he had never had the slightest chance of getting through this day without making a complete fool of himself, regardless of Lee’s ridiculous shirt. 

Lee pulled him closer and kissed him. Properly this time; a slow exploration that left Gaara’s head spinning and stole the air from his lungs. He leaned in for more as his hand settled over criss-crossing laces, an expanse of warm, exposed skin, and the thundering heart beneath.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! You can find me on [tumblr](https://lilac-writes.tumblr.com/), and make sure you go and give [@flightlessdevotee's](https://flightlessdevotee.tumblr.com/) art some love!


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